Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Octopus, The Southern Review, Florida Humanities Review, and a previous issue of Blackbird, as well as other journals and the website Poetry Daily and in the anthologies Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman (Iowa University, 2003) and Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World (Three Candles, 2006).

Murmur, a chapbook of recent poems, has recently been named the winner of the 2006 Poetry West Chapbook Competition and will be published in the coming months.

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Denver and the Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado, where he directs an undergraduate creative writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.

He is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a co-editor of the online journal storySouth, and a founding editor of Thicket, an electronic journal dedicated to Alabama writers and Alabama writing. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. His scholarship has appeared in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and his literary essays have appeared in Shenandoah and Florida Humanities Review.